This is just a quick little post to report my experience of deciding whether to reset my level on WK or not, and how it feels now that I actually did it. Hopefully this will give others some useful anecdotal information to help them decide whether they want to try resetting too, or to not reset, as the case may be.
[Honestly I don’t know much of what I could or should say. I just decided to post this on a bit of a whim, since I’m feeling pretty good about WK after resetting to level 7 about a week ago. I may add more to this post later, if I can think of some more information to add to it. (Any feedback or your own stories are of course very welcome! 
) For now, here’s the short version that I wanted to post: …]
Basically, around the time Covid started to become a pandemic, but honestly probably even a bit before that, my anxieties around doing WaniKani (and just learning Japanese in general via various websites, including BunPro and others) started to build up to the point that I was getting stressed out trying to keep up with reviews. (I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), so my anxieties are probably more exaggerated than a typical person’s would be. I wasn’t really ‘overdoing it’ compared to a typical person, but for me personally, I was treading a thin line of ‘overdoing it’.)
I had reached level 28 on WK, which I still feel pretty proud of, as it marks a significant long-term commitment that I was able to achieve, even though technically now it has been ‘reset’. The experience of having achieved that was not lost by resetting! (No reason why it would be, of course, but remember the whole GAD thing; I have anxieties over seemingly trivial things like that all the time 
. In any case, the point remains: The feeling/experience of achieving my ‘high score’ was not lost by resetting! That’s a good thing! 
)
Anyway, the point is that due to GAD/Covid I ended up taking an extended break from WK for a bit over a year. (Thankfully, I had foreseen something like this might happen, which is why I saved up and got the lifetime membership Christmas deal, way back when, so taking breaks from WK wouldn’t make me feel guilty for not using a year-long membership ‘efficiently’ (again, a generalized anxiety maybe other people don’t worry about).)
The real kicker that ended up flipping my mental switch to reset was that coming back to WK after such a long break, I had forgotten so many of the reviews that it became ‘painful’ to try to chip away at the review stack (which I had successfully done once before, but not this many! Over 9000 2000!). Before, I had always been able to enjoy time spent on WK, and that was really important to me, to help me keep my motivation up.
So, I did a quick search of the forums for topics like ‘should I reset’ or whatever, and found a few posts that had great ideas in them (both pro and con). I think it was eventually one of @Leebo’s comments (that resetting ‘felt good’; and he should know, since he’s reset at least 3 times IIRC(!)) that finally tipped the scales towards resetting. And so, after figuring out roughly what level I should reset down to (a full reset would have been too boring in the beginning, I think; I’m pretty solid with the first few levels), I ventured into the Danger Zone! (No, really, that’s what it’s called, in the User menu under Settings! )
So, wrapping up for now: After about a week of redoing level 7, and even resurrecting some level 6 burned items I couldn’t remember, it does feel good! The ‘pressure’ is off, and I can review items that I probably rushed too much in the first place. Getting to a ‘high’ level was originally a nice challenge I set myself, and I certainly feel like I achieved that with level 28, but my real, main goal is to actually be able to read and understand some Japanese! If my forgotten-yet-somehow-burned items and big stack of reviews represented my inability to remember/read/understand those kanji/vocab, then of course it makes sense (now that I have 20/20 hindsight) to reset to a more appropriate level and return back to those ‘old friends’ I’ve lost acquaintance with.
So, there ya go! I hope this little story (longer than I expected, actually! ) maybe helps someone out there figure out if resetting might be worth the risk, or if they can probably just chug away at their stack until it’s back under control (it’s certainly doable, and a good option for many people!), or whatever. Best of luck to anyone who is faced with such a decision. And, cheers! Just do your best: 頑張ってください!
! “POLL!!”